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How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

lalitm.com

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Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#21

Post by Geof25 »

9dev wrote: post #2

Funny people should have that problem. I have spent most of my career in the startup space, and my experience has consistently been that the amount of problems to solve is vastly larger than what I can reasonably achieve in my waking hours. So I don't find problems to solve, I try to assess which problems are most urgent, or which solution solves several of them at once. Learning to get that kind of prioritisation ri…

I am doing exactly same thing of creating a solution which can be applied to multiple problems at the same time.

Sometimes coworkers does not like that because they don't see me working on the problem, but on a tool which will resolve the problem and similar problems from our backlog.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#22

Post by lalitmaganti »

NBJack wrote: post #14

I think the first problem may be fixing the broken mobile experience. I'm getting black text on a very dark gray background.

Thanks for letting me know; I cannot reproduce this myself on my mobile (it should be white text on a dark grey background) but I pushed a speculative fix which might improve things. Please let me know if it helps or, if not, I would love to know more details so I can fix this!

Thanks!

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#23

Post by devmor »

9dev wrote: post #2

Funny people should have that problem. I have spent most of my career in the startup space, and my experience has consistently been that the amount of problems to solve is vastly larger than what I can reasonably achieve in my waking hours. So I don't find problems to solve, I try to assess which problems are most urgent, or which solution solves several of them at once. Learning to get that kind of prioritisation ri…

It’s the same in a large corporate environment. I have a “personal projects” doc of ideas I’ve had to make development experiences better at my current role - it’s a couple hundred lines long.

I managed to get a couple of smaller tools out recently thanks to having copilot available to churn on them while I spend my time on prescribed work, but it would consume all of my time to even make a significant dent in it.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#24

Post by hankbond »

wpasc wrote: post #6

The author notes: > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way. I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controll…

Without providing too much detail, at my current place of employment I find that to be the case.

In most of my career, especially when in a Staff role, it has been up to me to propose the direction and priority of work within my scope. Usually, this is based on my estimation of the impact to the business (possible new features, security) or operations (devx, efficiency $$$). Obviously I still have to work with product to get things scheduled as they have needs that must be met, but it was as an equal partner. As a very creative person thats usually the space I enjoy the most.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#26

Post by alexpotato »

AlexMoffat wrote: post #12

Listen to your customers but ignore what they say. “Treat your customers like a kindergarten class. If they’re all asking for a snack they’re hungry but perhaps they really need a nutritious lunch instead.”

I spent the early part of my career (mid 2000s) working on a registration system for sports tournaments.

I had two jobs:

1. Writing the actual software for the registration website

2. Going to the events and managing the registration tent where people actually checked in

Doing 2 gave me a VASTLY better understanding of who the users were and how they thought. e.g. I assumed it would be tech savvy, organized people like me in their mid 20s. It was actually a mix of 40 something team dads who weren't tech savvy at all (b/c mid 2000s) but very organized and teenagers who were the opposite.

It meant effectively managing two completely different customer bases in the same product.

Coupled with the fact that cable modems were a new thing but not evenly distributed meant that we had to design the site accordingly.

At the time, I remember Joe Spolsky mentioning that at Microsoft they did two way mirror usability testing and it totally made sense. I wish more firms did that today.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#27

Post by zbentley »

intoXbox wrote: post #20

The part I find challenging in the senior-staff twilight is that having deep technical knowledge means I can solve short term problems, just as requests, fast and effectively. The author mentions that you should spend time understanding the frustrations from other teams, but that takes up loads of time and I don’t like being the person who talks and talks but doesn’t push code and ship features. I’d love to hear how…

I’ve experienced this. The critical realization for me was that most of those problems which I know I can solve quickly, without even having to write a Jira ticket or groom them into a sprint or whatever, are problems I should let someone else solve.

Sure, I can do them faster than others and pretty well. But if they’re truly things I can knock out in a day or two, they’re things that other staff can knock out in a week or two, and learn from the experience, and at that size they likely don’t require the standard of quality that I delude myself that I hold myself to.

At the lead/staff level, it’s far better to look for the kind of problems described in TFA: problems that are complex to identify, and for which the appropriate solutions aren’t always the obvious ones. My time is spent much better looking for those than being a 10x-speed senior engineer or whatever. There are actual senior engineers for that; I’m paid for the kind of work that they don’t or can’t do (yet, and to help model and mentor and train them to be able to do it), not to do the kind of work they already can do—whether I would do it faster/better doesn’t matter.

It’s case-by-case of course; sometimes a simple issue is critical or obscure enough (or tempting enough to override my iffy-at-best self-discipline) that I’ll jump on it. But I generally try to remember that a lot of the stuff I could look heroic for fixing in a jiffy is probably both not worth my salary allocation in the eyes of my grandboss, not critical time-wise, and a potential learning/accomplishment opportunity for others.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#28

Post by zuzululu »

My advice as someone working at staff engineer role for 3 different employers remotely and the "let problems accumulate" resonates but different context:

- don't be too proactive in solving issues that signals you are not busy to your employers.

- you are not hired to sit around 9-5, what you ship and how it impacts the business bottom line is far more important.

Especially true when I have to juggle 3 different employers. I will be in a long standup meeting with company A while I am answering slack messages from company B or company C has a deadline that overlaps with another and I'd have to work on at the same time.

Previously without LLMs this was very difficult but now its manageable, especially with openclaw and hermes doing a lot of lifting. This let me discover a lot of what's discussed in the article naturally.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#29

Post by pydry »

wpasc wrote: post #6

The author notes: > One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way. I wonder if the overall trend in tech is that engineers are experiencing less bottom-up autonomy and more top-down controll…

I think the autonomy was stripped not that long ago and it's making software products far worse.

It doesnt make sense that this would happen from an economic perspective at first glance - not unless you consider labor (devs), execs and investors to be three competing groups who are vying for power.

Re: How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer

#30

Post by alexpotato »

One thing that isn't often mentioned in these discussions:

Making sure that the work was actually done.

I've been a Staff Engineer and managed engineers and it's pretty shocking what people consider to be "done".

A couple examples:

- Doing a migration to using Tailscale and an engineer claims it's done even though there is just one giant ACL for the whole firm

- Migrating from one monitoring system to another despite only 80% of the alerts have been migrated

- etc

Some of this is business folks creating bad incentives. Some of it is not creating good "success criteria" for projects. Either way, someone has to go through and make sure that both the details and the big picture deliverables landed correctly.

This being HN, I'm sure someone will say something like "just hire better engineers". I've seen phenomenal engineers make bad choices here due to poor incentive design.

A perfect example:

- you reward people for hitting delivery deadlines

- you punish people when there are outages

you might think you're pretty smart until you realize the odds of getting yelled at if you miss a deadline is 100% but the odds of an outage are Again, the job of senior engineers/engineering managers is to make sure these things don't happen by both double checking work and also pushing back on bad incentives.

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